World renowned movie director Christopher Nolan is masterfully skilled at portraying deep and complex story lines with his films. This is why he attracts such large audiences with each release.
While watching Inception, at first I couldn’t understand the plot and had to go back and watch the movie more than three times to comprehend this complex story line. The more I watched, the more I got into the plot and could fully digest and understand the details of the story. I started to see that the director had profoundly showcased the quintessence of the human psyche.
What is the profound conclusion Nolan reveals through Inception? Nolan shows that the real world we live in and the fictional world of our dreams are overlapping.
In the movie, the characters use unique totems to decipher between the dream world and the real world. Through the true characteristics of the totems, the characters are able to comprehend if they are in the dream world or the actual true world.
But it is not limited to this film. The concept of Inception is not only relayed in the movie but also can be understood in real life.
People are incomplete because each of us aren’t really living in the real world but, instead, lives in a fake world of one’s own making. The reason people do not clearly recognize this is because the real world and the dream world overlap in the same way as Inception’s plot. People do not eat, sleep, work and communicate in the real world, but in the dream world they have created.
In Buddhism, there is a saying that ‘life is just a night’s dream.’ There are many contexts related to this such as ‘wake up from a dream and become liberated.’ This theory may seem easy to understand but is generally overlooked. Let us look more into it:
In elementary school, we learned that the invention of the camera was based on the principles of the human eye. Therefore, the human eye is the original camera. The human body has five senses. The eyes, nose, mouth, ears and body sensations are also all cameras taking pictures. We take pictures of everything we see, hear, speak and feel with our eyes and other senses storing them into our brain.
If we recall getting up this morning and having our breakfast, these very pictures are there. When you think of who you ate with and where you were, you can think of it and bring it to mind. How can this be?
Our body is a camera, so when we ate this morning, we took a picture of everything and a picture of ourselves in that picture simultaneously as it was happening. Hence, we were in the world of the picture taken. Not only when we have breakfast, but when we think of all the things such as going to work, meeting with friends, going to school and talking to people, everything comes to mind. How about this moment as well?
Please try later this evening, before you go to sleep, to remember this moment here reading this article. When you do, this moment here, where you’re reading this article will come up. Right now, you are taking pictures and reading this in your mind of pictures that is simultaneously overlapping the world. Tomorrow, we will continue to take pictures, and we will take pictures and live in them. We have never lived in the real world. We live in a world of our pictures that overlap with the real world.
As human beings, we are incomplete and when we pass away, we are illusions that just disappear. The dream world from the film Inception is the same context as the world of pictures explained here. While living, we must practice the meditation method in getting out of the dream world we have created and the self that is a picture in it. It is this meditation practice that provides a concrete way to discard it. While we are alive, we can discard all the dream world and the self that is a picture, return to the true mind of the world and see the habits we inherited from our parents.
In addition, if we completely discard all the remaining habits and truly become the clean body and mind of the true world, we will never again live in the dream world and live eternally.
In Buddhism, it is known as the great nirvana. It is possible to live a life of liberation instead of a life that disappears like a dream. Even in the Bible, there is a saying that we must repent and enter heaven. This means to breakdown and eliminate the false self and the dream world. If you let go of it all and return to God, then the land remaining is heaven and you will be blessed in that land living forever.
If you watch the movie Inception, you will witness profound explanations about life. I hope you will not overlook the reality of living in a dream world and can start this meditation practice soon. We can get out from the dream world and live coexisting eternally in the true world.
